The teacher shortage and what kids feel

National Center for Education Statistics data show that public school enrollment in teacher preparation programs declined from about 720,000 in 2010 to about 470,000 in 2020. Completers—students who actually finished and entered the workforce—dropped from about 250,000 to 160,000 over the same period. Some recovery has happened post-pandemic but enrollment remains far below the 2010 level. Meanwhile, the existing workforce has aged. The median teacher experience level, which had been rising, has begun to fall in many states as experienced teachers exit and are replaced by less experienced ones. The shortage is not a future event; it is the current operating condition of a meaningful slice of American public education.

The shortage is most acute in special education, math, science, world languages, and bilingual education. Geographically it concentrates in rural districts with limited candidate pools and in high-poverty urban districts with high turnover. Affluent suburban districts in most regions still have ample candidates for most positions. This concentration is the most important fact about the shortage and the one most often obscured by national averages. The children most affected by the shortage are those already disadvantaged in other ways. The labor market is sorting against them, and the policy response has not addressed the sorting mechanism.

Survey research consistently identifies the same drivers of teacher exit: inadequate administrative support, large class sizes, lack of resources, low compensation relative to alternatives, and a sense of disrespect from policymakers and the public. Pay matters but is not the dominant factor for most leavers; working conditions matter more. Teachers who feel they have professional autonomy, supportive colleagues, and capable leadership stay longer at the same pay than teachers who do not. This is the central finding of Richard Ingersoll's work and has held across decades of replication. A retention strategy focused on pay alone misses most of what drives the decision.

Roughly half of teachers leave the profession within their first five years. The exit rate is highest in the first three years, and highest in the most challenging schools. This means the schools that most need experienced teachers are perpetually staffed by teachers who are about to leave. Induction support—mentoring, reduced loads, structured onboarding—reduces early-career exit substantially. Few districts implement it well. The cost of induction is small relative to the cost of constant turnover, but the costs sit in different budget lines and the political case for induction support is weaker than the political case for higher salaries.

When teachers cannot be hired, students get substitutes. The substitute pool in most districts has eroded badly since the pandemic. Substitutes who took the job because schools were the only options during the lockdowns have moved on. The remaining pool is smaller, less qualified, and increasingly drawn from people who could not get other work. A class taught by substitutes for substantial portions of the year is a class in which instruction effectively does not happen. This is the most acute symptom of the shortage and the one parents see most directly. The instructional loss is real and measurable.

When a vacancy persists, many districts fill it with a long-term substitute—often a person without teaching credentials, sometimes without a degree in the subject. The student in this classroom is, on paper, in a math class. In practice, the student is in a room with an adult who is doing their best but is not equipped to teach math at grade level. The state reports this position as "filled." The achievement data show the cost in the spring. The hidden labor force of long-term subs is masking the real depth of the shortage from policymakers who look at vacancy reports.

Qualitative research on student perceptions of teacher turnover finds consistent themes. Students describe feeling forgotten when a teacher leaves: the new teacher has to learn the class from scratch, the routines are disrupted, the trust that took months to build has to be rebuilt. Older students describe a kind of cynicism—a sense that the school is not a stable institution and that adult investment in them is provisional. Younger students show attachment behavior toward stable adults that becomes harder to satisfy in a turbulent staffing environment. The emotional cost is documented but rarely centered in the policy conversation, which tends to discuss the workforce in instrumental terms.

Teachers in the United States earn roughly 20 percent less than comparably educated workers in other professions, a gap that has widened over recent decades. The gap varies by state—larger in some, smaller in others—and is largest for early-career teachers. A college student deciding between teaching and another career-track profession faces a substantial lifetime earnings cost for choosing teaching. Many still choose it; the ones who do not choose it are increasingly the ones with the strongest academic preparation, which has measurable downstream effects on instruction quality. The compensation gap is a slow leak that has been depressurizing the pipeline for a generation.

In response to the shortage, many states have expanded alternative pathways to certification—shorter programs, on-the-job training, emergency credentials. These pathways reduce the entry cost and bring more candidates into the workforce. They also tend to produce teachers who leave the profession faster. The trade-off is real: alternative certification fills classrooms in the short term and depletes them in the medium term. Some alternative pathways, well-designed with strong induction, produce teachers who stay; many do not. The current expansion of alt-cert without quality controls is likely to deepen the retention problem it was meant to address.

When a position cannot be filled, the most common short-term response is to increase class sizes elsewhere. A 28-student class becomes a 32-student class to absorb the gap. The teacher absorbing the additional students experiences worse working conditions, which makes them more likely to leave, which creates the next vacancy. The shortage is a self-reinforcing dynamic in which each unfilled position degrades the conditions for the teachers who are still there. Breaking the cascade requires investment that exceeds the cost of just filling the original position, which is part of why so few districts manage to do it.

Teachers consistently identify school leadership as a top determinant of whether they stay. A principal who supports teachers, advocates for them, and creates a coherent professional environment retains staff at much higher rates than a principal who does not. School leadership is itself in shortage; principal turnover has been rising, and principal preparation programs have similar enrollment problems to teacher prep. The system depends on a leadership layer that is itself depleted. Investments in principal quality may be among the highest-leverage interventions for teacher retention, but principal pipelines receive even less attention than teacher pipelines.

A serious teacher workforce plan would do several things simultaneously. It would raise compensation for the hardest jobs—high-poverty schools, special education, math and science—with differentials large enough to actually shift labor market choices. It would invest heavily in induction and mentoring for early-career teachers. It would shorten and subsidize the entry pipeline without lowering quality, including paid residency programs that have shown strong evidence. It would invest in principal preparation as a parallel project. It would address the structural working conditions—class size, planning time, administrative support—that drive exit. None of this is exotic. All of it has evidence behind it. The reason it is not happening at scale is that it requires sustained funding commitments that exceed normal political time horizons, and a willingness to acknowledge that teachers are the central asset of public education rather than a cost to be minimized.

1. Goldhaber, Dan, and Michael Hansen. "Race, Gender, and Teacher Testing: How Informative a Tool Is Teacher Licensure Testing?" American Educational Research Journal 47, no. 1 (2010): 218–251. 2. Darling-Hammond, Linda. The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future. New York: Teachers College Press, 2010. 3. Ingersoll, Richard M., Elizabeth Merrill, Daniel Stuckey, and Gregory Collins. "Seven Trends: The Transformation of the Teaching Force." CPRE Research Report #RR 2018-2, University of Pennsylvania, 2018. 4. Goldhaber, Dan, Roddy Theobald, and Christopher Tien. "Educator and Student Diversity in Washington State." Center for Education Data & Research, University of Washington, 2022. 5. Ingersoll, Richard M. "Is There Really a Teacher Shortage?" Consortium for Policy Research in Education, University of Pennsylvania, 2003. 6. Hanushek, Eric A., John F. Kain, and Steven G. Rivkin. "Why Public Schools Lose Teachers." Journal of Human Resources 39, no. 2 (2004): 326–354. 7. Darling-Hammond, Linda, and Channa M. Cook-Harvey. Educating the Whole Child: Improving School Climate to Support Student Success. Palo Alto, CA: Learning Policy Institute, 2018. 8. Sutcher, Leib, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Desiree Carver-Thomas. "A Coming Crisis in Teaching? Teacher Supply, Demand, and Shortages in the U.S." Palo Alto, CA: Learning Policy Institute, 2016. 9. Goldhaber, Dan, and Roddy Theobald. "Teacher Attrition and Mobility in the Pandemic." Educational Researcher 51, no. 4 (2022): 235–238. 10. Ingersoll, Richard M., and Henry May. "The Magnitude, Destinations, and Determinants of Mathematics and Science Teacher Turnover." Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 34, no. 4 (2012): 435–464. 11. Carver-Thomas, Desiree, and Linda Darling-Hammond. Teacher Turnover: Why It Matters and What We Can Do About It. Palo Alto, CA: Learning Policy Institute, 2017. 12. Hanushek, Eric A., Steven G. Rivkin, and Jeffrey C. Schiman. "Dynamic Effects of Teacher Turnover on the Quality of Instruction." Economics of Education Review 55 (2016): 132–148.